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Avigdor Arikha, Artist of the Everyday, Is Dead at 81

Avigdor Arikha, an internationally renowned Israeli painter whose work captured both the haunting beauty and the looming menace of everyday things, a vision informed in no small part by his experience as a Holocaust survivor, died at his home in Paris on Thursday, the day after his 81st birthday.

The cause was complications of cancer, said David Robinson, senior director of the Marlborough Gallery in New York, which represents Mr. Arikha. He was a longtime resident of Paris and also had a home in Jerusalem.

Mr. Arikha (his full name is pronounced AH-vig-dor ah-REE-kuh) was known for his depictions of his immediate orbit: the view from his studio window, chairs and tables, clothing and other orderly household things. He was also a portraitist, painting his friends and family as well as luminaries like the actresses Moira Shearer and Catherine Deneuve, and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, whose portrait was commissioned by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

He often captured the playwright Samuel Beckett, a close friend in Paris. The friendship between Arikha family and Beckett, who died in 1989, is chronicled in “How It Was” (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005), a memoir by Mr. Arikha’s wife, Anne Atik, illustrated by Mr. Arikha.

Formerly an abstract artist, Mr. Arikha renounced abstractionism in the mid-1960s. “People who think there is anything new in the arts are idiots,” he told The Washington Post in 1979. “In my early 30s I was quite successful as an abstractionist. But I started painting my own set of forms over and over again. Finally, it repulsed me.”

While his later paintings are obviously representational, they retain strong elements of abstraction in their focus on the pure geometry of objects. Mr. Arikha called this twinned style “post-abstract naturalism.” He came up with the name, as he told The Post in the same interview, “after my shock at the stupidity of an art critic who wrote about my very nice impressionist work.”

Unusually for a working artist, Mr. Arikha also wrote and lectured extensively on art history. He curated several exhibitions at major museums, among them “J. A. D. Ingres: Fifty Life Drawings from the Musée Ingres at Montauban,” shown in 1986 at the Frick Collection in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

His own art is in the collections of the Louvre; the Tate Gallery in London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Jewish Museum in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and elsewhere. In 2005, he was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French government.

Photo

Avigdor ArikhaCredit
Sergio Barrenechea/European Pressphoto Agency

Mr. Arikha abhorred artificial light and worked only in daylight. As critics often remarked, this lent his art luminous beauty. But for all their loveliness, his paintings are also deliberately unsettling, with a current of unease running just below the surface.

On Mr. Arikha’s canvases, people and objects can be positioned with discomforting asymmetry. Within a single painting, a white expanse like a wall may be offset by a dark expanse, rendering the image at once spacious and oppressive. He also cropped his subjects in unorthodox places, lopping off parts of familiar objects — or worse still, people — to disturbing effect.

In his painting “Sunflowers” (2001), for instance, Mr. Arikha depicts two large, vivid blooms, one seen completely, the other truncated disconcertingly at the left edge of the canvas.

While some critics took Mr. Arikha to task for making representational art, others praised his lyricism, impeccable draftsmanship and nuanced use of color. Reviewing an exhibition of his work at Marlborough in 2002, Michael Kimmelman wrote in The New York Times: “Painting this refined and gorgeous is in short supply today and precious. Mr. Arikha, a throwback at 73, reminds us what craft means and how pleasurable it is to see.”

Mr. Arikha was born on April 28, 1929, to a German-speaking Jewish family in Czernowitz, then in Romania. (It is now Chernivtsi, in Ukraine.) In 1941, at 12, he was deported by the Nazis to a Ukrainian labor camp. There, on fragments of butcher paper, he drew what he saw around him.

In 1944, he and his sister were rescued by the International Red Cross and transported to Palestine. Their mother was able to follow them there; their father was killed in the Holocaust.

As a youth, Mr. Arikha studied art in Jerusalem. In 1948, serving in Israel’s war of independence, he was severely wounded and left for dead. He recovered and made his way to Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts.

Besides his wife, Ms. Atik, an American poet, Mr. Arikha is survived by their daughters, Alba Smail and Noga Simonetta, and two grandchildren.

Deeply influenced by Asian art, Mr. Arikha liked to paint fast, in a Zenlike state of consciousness. This transcendent state let art flow out of him so freely that he typically finished a whole canvas in a single sitting.

“Economy of means is, in fact, the threshold of concentration,” Mr. Arikha told The New York Times in 1986. “When I draw and paint, the essential thing is not to know what I do, or else I cannot come to what I see.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 1, 2010, on page D8 of the New York edition with the headline: Avigdor Arikha, Artist of the Everyday, Is Dead at 81. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe